Bridgetown’s glimmer of hope

A prominent Bridgetown businessman is still holding out hope for a revival of The City even as more enterprises abandon the island’s capital.

With hardly a tourist in sight, fewer shoppers with the kind of disposable income who can be enticed into spending and owners continuing to shut shop, Eddy Abed, former president of the Barbados Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BCCI), admits the situation is bad.

However, the owner of Abeds Stores told Barbados TODAY, there were signs the situation could improve, though marginally.

A key player in the BCCI’s Revitalisation of Bridgetown initiative, Abed said “incremental improvements” were occurring, even as business activity in The City remains very sluggish.

Abed said long-standing businesses like his were buoyed by Government’s plans to repurpose the Treasury Building in the heart of Bridgetown into upscaled, residential condominiums, and the long-delayed start to construction of the Hyatt hotel on Bay Street.

“The bigger development is the Pierhead Project, where five buildings have been bought and are going to be repurposed for residential, office, recreational, museum, and hotel-type opportunities.

“Where that is, in terms of the progress? I can only assume it has been pushed back . . .I can only tell you what has been told to us. I believe the developers are not the type to buy it and sit on the development. They intend to do something a lot more ambitious [than previously disclosed], once the environment changes. There must be a positive return if you are going to invest that kind of money,” Abed pointed out.

“If the environment is not positioned to provide that return on investment, then the investors will sit back and wait. I don’t think you are going to see much more of an improvement in Bridgetown, the way we would like to see it – attracting fresh enterprises like entertainment, food and different types of business – until we have two things happening. There must be fresh investment and the tourism sector has to regain its robustness in a sustainable manner. Currently, that is not the situation,” he assessed.

Despite the delayed projects and depressed sales, Abed insisted there was still a reason to be hopeful.

“We are optimistic. Many of us have heard this record before and many of us feel it is a waiting game. I want to assure you this is not the case; things are going to happen. The City will be revived but a lot slower than many of us had anticipated.”

He explained that the Bridgetown businesses which were surviving were the ones that had “pivoted to the new reality”.

“Many of us have an online presence; we can sell to our customers online and a lot of us have changed what we are doing to recognise that there is a certain level of unemployment. Those individuals who have shopped on a weekly basis, can no longer do so and we have to pitch to a different type of clientele.”

In the BCCI’s 2020 annual report, the Bridgetown Revitalisation Committee disclosed: “The Committee represented the Chamber at a meeting convened by the Ministry of Innovation and Smart Technology (MIST) on September 15, 2020 to discuss the installation of 76 Wi-Fi access points in Bridgetown on government and private sector buildings, spanning Barbados Port Inc, Fontabelle, City Centre, Parliament Building and Independence Square. The objective is to provide wi-fi access to visitors and locals under the Ministry’s Bridgetown Wi-Fi project.” (IMC1)